Loïse Lenne

The aim of this research is to question and clarify the use of the term “event” in relation to architectural achievements and the phenomena surrounding them. It was conducted through the study of three European tower and business districts—the City, La Défense, and Frankfurt—which appear conducive to the search for events. The architectural event is seen, like any event, not as an immanent given that occurs by itself, but as a construct in which each actor participates upstream and downstream, from the client who organizes a competition to the media that shape its reception. This construction is characteristic of the recent period. The architectural event as we define it is not simply a mode of existence of the event, but the product of a particular relationship to time that some historians see as being solely focused on the present and describe using the concept of the regime of historicity. In the neighborhoods studied, the event takes the form of staging the existing during festivals or through the construction of buildings that appear timeless and beyond any question of style. It no longer necessarily causes a rupture. But while this phenomenon draws all eyes to the architecture of the buildings, it also reduces their architectural characteristics. Architecture, by becoming an event or being used by a festive event, is seen only in terms of more or less reduced typological questions and differentiation for the sake of memory. These two points are seen as the irreducible part of architecture, indissoluble in the event, the last lever of action for architects grappling with a demand for events.